


Ice House

by Pares (kormantic)



Category: Little House on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-06
Updated: 2008-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-20 09:43:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9485519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/Pares
Summary: "It's only a scandal if someone finds out," he said reasonably.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seraphcelene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphcelene/gifts).



Eliza Jane had been almost pretty once, and back before she became resigned to spinsterhood, Almanzo had often heard her giggling nervously about one boy or another to Alice. She would warn Alice about haylofts and about boys being cheeky and about stolen kisses, with her big, bossy voice gone all a skinny wobble like a new lamb. _Oh Alice,_ she'd said, _To think I might even let a man kiss me before we were wed!_

Almanzo had kissed Laura plenty, and that was way before he'd ever even thought about being married to anyone, let alone a slip of a thing like her. He was 25 before he ever saw her, and he'd kissed six girls before her and done maybe more than that with one or two of them, but Laura had been quite the little lady, all of fifteen that first icy day, and she'd had hardly a thing to say to him the entire sleigh ride to the Bouchie School that first week.

After three years of weekly sleigh rides, she warmed to him some, and it came to be that they would hold hands under the lap robe and soon she was very near to cuddled up on him if it was darkish out or there were no neighbors to see them. And maybe he was a grown man and she was hardly even to his shoulder, but she knew her own mind and her lips were sweet as maple candy.

So the pastor had read their vows and they'd repeated them, and now Laura lay still as a mouse under the coverlet of their new marriage bed. He hardly knew how she could stand it; the sun was barely down as yet, and still it was fearfully hot. Come summer, he himself slept in hardly a stitch when it had been just him, but for Eliza Jane, in her own little room across the house. He wondered if it would scare Laura, all himself in his own skin; he'd gotten some of his shirt undone once by Molly Gavin from the next town over, and she'd been all eyes and shivering. Laura now seemed just a mite today, hardly older than she'd been when he met her, hardly a woman at all.

Shifting under the blankets, Laura leaned up on her elbows and kicked the coverlet down, dressed only in her white nightdress, with scarlet embroidery at the collar, her dainty little feet almost as white as the new sheets her mother had given them.

"Oh, it's just too hot! I'm like to stifle, 'Manzo, truly." Her little face was flushed and her pointed chin was tense and frowning. Oh Lord, she looked half angry at him, but it was better than afraid.

"I could go to the ice house for you. Or we could go together," he grinned. He was kind of partial to that idea… all the ice blocked into low walls packed with wet braids of sweet hay. It would be a cool little gully, and dark and lonesome and quiet too, and there he could press his hot face against his new wife's cheek and throat and bosom...

Her face was still flushed, but her angry look was gone. It could be that she was fair piqued by the lure of the ice house herself.

"It's a scandal, that's what you want this day to be," she chirruped, but she looked secretly pleased.

"It's only a scandal if someone finds out," he said reasonably. "Come now, Mrs. Wilder, won't you please accompany your husband on a promenade?"

He held out his hand to her.

She took it.


End file.
